Exactly 109 years ago, on October 26, 1916, the French army's chief medical officer, Dr. Gèrard Encausse, passed away. He went down in history under the pseudonym Papus (a name taken from Apollonius of Tyana's Nuctemeron and corresponding, in fact, to the genius of medicine).
Papus died in the main military hospital in Paris, located on the Ile de France, where he had been admitted a few days earlier due to the after-effects of a serious infectious disease contracted at the front where, called up as a medical officer at the outbreak of the First World War, he provided medical care to wounded and sick soldiers.
It seems certain that the cause of death was the infamous influenza pandemic known as the “Spanish flu,” which caused several thousand deaths during the First World War. Gérard Encausse was born in La Coruña, Spain, on July 13, 1865, and was therefore only 51 years old.
His father was French and a notable scholar of alchemy, while his mother was Spanish of Gypsy origin. This strongly Mediterranean combination endowed Papus with an eclectic temperament and prodigious intuition, as well as an extraordinary propensity for the study of the occult sciences and magic. He moved across the entire spectrum of the complex world of esotericism: from Scottish Freemasonry to Egyptian Freemasonry of Memphis and Misraim, from mesmerism and dowsing to the scientific study of spiritualism, from the magical school of the late Eliphas Levi to his partnership with Count Stanislas de Guaita in the Order of the Kabbalistic Rose+Cross, from the study of tarot to that of spagyric hermeticism, finally becoming a disciple of the Lyonese mystic and miracle worker Maitre Philippe, with whom he traveled to Russia on several occasions, becoming closely acquainted with Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
In 1891, after preparations that began in 1888 through the exchange of mutual initiations from Louis Claude de Saint-Martin with the orientalist Augustin Chaboseau (who had received Martinist initiation from his aunt Amalie Boisse de Mortemartre, while Papus had been initiated by Henri Delaage, Chaboseau's nephew and a direct disciple of S. Martin) Gérard Encausse founded the Martinist Order, which expanded considerably throughout the world in just a few years. Today, on the anniversary of what his son, Philippe Encausse, who reorganized the Martinist Order after World War II, called Papus' “disincarnation,” all true, authentic, and regular Martinists on earth turn their heartfelt and grateful thoughts to the man who was their first and common Grand Master.
Papus died in the main military hospital in Paris, located on the Ile de France, where he had been admitted a few days earlier due to the after-effects of a serious infectious disease contracted at the front where, called up as a medical officer at the outbreak of the First World War, he provided medical care to wounded and sick soldiers.
It seems certain that the cause of death was the infamous influenza pandemic known as the “Spanish flu,” which caused several thousand deaths during the First World War. Gérard Encausse was born in La Coruña, Spain, on July 13, 1865, and was therefore only 51 years old.
His father was French and a notable scholar of alchemy, while his mother was Spanish of Gypsy origin. This strongly Mediterranean combination endowed Papus with an eclectic temperament and prodigious intuition, as well as an extraordinary propensity for the study of the occult sciences and magic. He moved across the entire spectrum of the complex world of esotericism: from Scottish Freemasonry to Egyptian Freemasonry of Memphis and Misraim, from mesmerism and dowsing to the scientific study of spiritualism, from the magical school of the late Eliphas Levi to his partnership with Count Stanislas de Guaita in the Order of the Kabbalistic Rose+Cross, from the study of tarot to that of spagyric hermeticism, finally becoming a disciple of the Lyonese mystic and miracle worker Maitre Philippe, with whom he traveled to Russia on several occasions, becoming closely acquainted with Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
In 1891, after preparations that began in 1888 through the exchange of mutual initiations from Louis Claude de Saint-Martin with the orientalist Augustin Chaboseau (who had received Martinist initiation from his aunt Amalie Boisse de Mortemartre, while Papus had been initiated by Henri Delaage, Chaboseau's nephew and a direct disciple of S. Martin) Gérard Encausse founded the Martinist Order, which expanded considerably throughout the world in just a few years. Today, on the anniversary of what his son, Philippe Encausse, who reorganized the Martinist Order after World War II, called Papus' “disincarnation,” all true, authentic, and regular Martinists on earth turn their heartfelt and grateful thoughts to the man who was their first and common Grand Master.
